Our rental in Taupō (pronounced toe-paw), a holiday destination popular with younger adults wanting to meet up and socialise, is a large house. It has 14 beds, and there are only a few places this size in the area. It also has lots of facilities attractive for a fun weekend: indoor pool, spa, home theatre, BBQ on the terrace, etc.
The property is named Omaio, which is Maori for “quiet place” (pronounced oar-my-oar).
It was designed to cater to multi-generational groups on holiday. We’ve put a lot of effort into making it perfect, so we felt uneasy about the possibility of guests hosting a party and damaging it. Minut helps us attract good guests and keep Omaio’s noise to an acceptable level for the neighbourhood. We want our guests to have a good time, so we are definitely not trying to stop them from doing that. It’s just about being respectful to our community.
Like the property manager in your Ibiza case study, I was in the process of building my own WiFi-based noise monitor system when I eventually discovered Minut. I had gone as far as buying the components for it as I had searched on the web a couple of times without success. The property manager we use had not heard of Minut.
Minut has worked great for us. The agreements used by the managers make it clear there is noise monitoring equipment and that seems to discourage most of those wanting to party.
The only incident we have had since installing was that one group had among them a “tech” geek who thought he would be able to “neutralise” the noise monitoring. He removed all the units on arrival and put them in cupboards.
The system, of course, immediately informed me that the units had been shifted.
The guests were contacted and told they should not have moved the units and requested to return the units to their proper locations. They reinstalled three correctly but one they did not. They were somewhat surprised when rung and thanked for reinstalling three but that they needed to properly place the fourth unit.
The guest wrote a stinking review on the website they booked through. The manager sent a polite but clear response indicating why the guest was not happy. We were delighted with this as this guest's bad review is a great way to inform potential guests that our house is not a place to have a party. The angry post sends a clear signal to potential customers: Minut monitoring does work and is very sophisticated.
Our new short-term rental is located in a different city, Wellington. It will be targeted at groups coming to mountain bike. There is a large mountain bike park opposite and the house is set in a large block of private land that has several kilometers of private tracks for riding/walking. The guests we expect will mainly be groups of young people. The house is also reasonably large and could sleep 14-15, but we are initially fitting it out for nine and may increase when we see what the demand is like. We are able to shut off part of the house.
We would not have contemplated turning this property into a short-term rental without our experience with Minut. The property could easily become “party central” without Minut, given the likely market.
- New Zealand Host
